Georgia Theresa Gilmore was born on February 5, 1920, in Montgomery, Alabama, where she lived and worked her entire life. And,as we explain in the podcast, that life was far from easy. By the time she was in her 20s she had a long list of jobs including laundress, railroad tie-changer, midwife, and the one that she used to solely support her growing household of six children, her mother, and various extended family: a cook.
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Katharine Meyer Graham was born on June 16, 1917, in New York City, the fourth child of Eugene Meyer and Agnes Ernst Meyer. She had a very upper-class upbringing thanks to her incredibly successful investor father who had a second career in politics and a third in newspaper publishing after he purchased the then-failing Washington Post. Katharine’s mother, Agnes, was a powerhouse art patron and philanthropist (with a spicy side of political activism) while maybe not the fuzziest of maternal figures, she was a product of her times and class.
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They said it couldn’t be done; that the deck, and the odds, were stacked against her, but Trudy Ederle listened only to her heart during her record-breaking swim across the English Channel. She was the first woman to accomplish this feat, and her record would hold for another 24 years, but there was a lot more to her life than one phenomenal swim.
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Emily Roebling stepped in to facilitate the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge after her husband, its chief engineer, fell victim to a mysterious illness. Though her contributions were kept shadowed at the time, later generations have realized how critical she was to the project’s completion (and she did so much more afterward!)
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